An actress stands on stage in front of a large screen, her thoughts in her past – and simultaneously in virtual worlds with VR glasses. A cascade of intertwined, immersive memory spaces emerges. A reality matroshka that begins with an inner-immersive play of the performer, continues through the virtual reality construction and the peculiar reality of a theater stage into the reality constructions of our world.

Rabea Kiel and Adolfina Fuck (Matthias Meppelink) have a longstanding collaboration, through Applied Theater Studies in Giessen and with the performance group Monster Truck. Since 2021, the duo has been exploring the medium of virtual reality as a performative tool with the aim of a productive misappropriation for theater.

In a mobile performance through four private apartments in Neukölln, director Christiane Mudra provides insight into the lives of mentally ill people and describes the situation in Germany’s psychiatric institutions from the Nazi era to the present day. In the process, »Selfie & Ich« unmasks en passant the systemic deformation of our oh-so-happy meritocracy.

investigative
stands for journalistic long-term research that is based primarily on original sources and also uncovers unknown facts.

theater
plays out the research specifically in different formats. investigative theater experiments with digital tools and seeks interaction with the audience.

The fourth edition of the LABOR SONOR concert series 2023 – back at Ballhaus Ost with concerts and performances by Maikon K, the VanProject and Rabih Beaini. Sonic & aesthetic experiments between dance, music theater and analog techno.

Labor Sonor – the series for experimental music, film and performance – presents the spectrum of current experimental forms beyond genre-specific determinability – from real-time music to electronics, performance, audiovisual formats, conceptual music, new composed music and experimental pop.

Kompositionen von S. Ercklentz, E. Grosskopf, R. Hoyer, S. Roigk, S. Weismann, U. Wassermann. Mit Megaphonen, Mikrofonen, Flüstertüten und Handlautsprechern werden die Stimmen zu sich wandelnden Konstellationen choreografiert.

Die Maulwerker, Kollektiv für stimmliche Experimente, integrieren Elemente aus Performance Art, intermedialer Kunst und Choreografie in ihre Musik.

After a year of searching, we reach the finale of the original opera. After stops in Barbieland, the Spanish Civil War and outer space, the search now finds itself, ending in a story that only seems banal: a soap opera.

The Helmi Puppentheater Kollektiv from Berlin has been at Ballhaus Ost since 2006. They combine many artistic languages and directions in their shows, in which the Helmi puppets and a self-written music always take leading roles.

ما تلاش می کنیم تا شیوه کاری خود را ترجمه کنیم. به زبان های مختلف، به شکل تصاویر و باز به نمایش برگردانیم. به همراه خسرو محمودی، بازیگر، که از اوقات فراغت خود برای ترجمانی رومان به فارسی استفاده می کند و برای او این سوال مطرح است که چگونه می توان “خوک داشتن” را به درستی ترجمه کرد.
به همراه سباستین کوناس، هنرمند صداپرداز، که درگیر این سوال است که از چه زمان، زبان به موسیقی تبدیل می شود و با احمد جمالی، مترجمی که از شغل روزمره خود می گوید. آنها این سوال ها را مطرح می کنند: تماشاچیِ ما واقعا کیست، چه دریافتی از این کار دارد، در تیاتر چه چیزی را تجربه می کند و چگونه می توان این را ترجمه کرد؟

Language is the house we live in and vorschlag:hammer want to open the doors of their house, let others in and rebuild it. They want to try to translate their theater. Into a multi-translated evening about translation, in which content and form are interdependent and which leads from the dominance of a spoken language to multilingualism and the offer of emancipated self-interpretation of images. A space in which many understand something, but no one understands everything.

vorschlag:hammer have been developing theater productions as a collective since 2009. In recent years, their performative narrative theater has opened up to a wide variety of aesthetic strategies, to visual-atmospheric or body-oriented works. They freely adapt existing material or develop research-based productions on ever new topics.

What would happen if Christmas didn’t exist?
Christmas is the most beautiful celebration of the year for most people, and yet everything often happens at the last minute. Many people associate Christmas only with stress and agony: Rushing through the stores to get the necessary, increasingly expensive gifts. But in a time of frantic speed, we need things to give us pause. A wintry world celebrates the breakthrough of love and hope.
God sends his Son to earth as a little helpless child. We experience God’s closeness to humanity. He shares his life with us, knows about joy and sorrow. He gives us hope, shows us how small beginnings can grow into great things. But it came to pass at that time…”, we all know the beginning of this story and also its end, but in the meantime the world has changed.
This year again we want to celebrate a morning of joy and reflection with memories and shining children’s eyes, a classic nativity play.

2023 really for the last time.

»Antigone pitched« subjects the Antigone material to a queer crip reading, reducing it to three characters and a law-breaking act of care. Voices and gestures are distorted, alienated, and hysterified to the point of unfamiliarity: A hyperformalized play that complicates and poeticizes embodiment.

Under the label ANTISEPT, Julia*n Meding invites different collaborators to work on self-empowering readings of chronic illness / disability and alternative concepts of healing. Together the constellation develops rehearsal strategies and forms of sensual mediation.

»La Memoria Futura« makes the material of the biographical family archive of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo accessible with a site-specific performance and subsequent sound installation. After the premiere in Buenos Aires at Parque de la Memoria, the multidisciplinary team from Argentina and Germany now brings the work to Ballhaus Ost and the neighboring Cemetery Park.

Las Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo was founded in Argentina in 1977 by the mothers of those who disappeared during the last Argentine dictatorship. Their goal is and has been to locate all the disappeared children and return them to their rightful families. In 1999, the Abuelas founded the Biographical Family Archive for the grandchildren who had not yet found out who their mothers and fathers had been. Today, this material has become one of the largest oral archives in Latin America, consisting of documents (photographs, writings, letters) and more than 2200 interviews, 144 of which belong to the grandmothers who have left their testimony so that the transmission through generations is not interrupted.

Hysterisches Globusgefühl embark together with the audience on a search for pure and liberated fun, a utopian place where no one loses their laughter and everyone has an equal amount to laugh about.

The performance collective Hysterisches Globusgefühl (Berlin/Vienna) direct their artistic work against the heteronormative patriarchy with full heart and solidarity and develop utopias for an anti-racist, classless, queerfeminist and respectful future. In 2011 awarded the jury prize of the festival “Arena… der jungen Künste” for “Macht was: Macht nichts!”, the experiences of this first production became the basis for further performances, in which public and theater space are intertwined. At the center of their work stands the question of conscious action, political interaction and global malaise.

N O T E :
Discriminatory stereotypes are reproduced and negotiated. There are offers of participation and interaction that do not have to be accepted. At the end of the play, loud and expansive blowers are suddenly used.